Dean's World

I've been telling people for ten years now that the idea that low-fat, low-cholesterol diets were healthy was rubbish. They don't do more than marginally help with weight loss, and they don't help prevent cancer or heart disease or reduce mortality in any detectable way.

You know, it's amazing the names I and others have been called for saying so, but it's increasingly the accepted medical view.

I mention all this just because I saw this article this morning on Instapundit: Unhappy Meals.

Most of the advice nutritionists and physicians have been giving people on diet over the last couple of decades has simply been wrong. Tragic, eh?

An interesting story. To quote:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Now, which of the saintly pharmaceutical companies will step forward to provide the clinical trials, knowing that they won't make much of any money off of them?

Yeah. I'll hold my breath.

We've actually known for decades now that vitamin C in megadose quantities kills cancer cells. How many clinical trials have been conducted on that? A tiny handful, decades ago, and they only used oral dosages. A couple of years ago one very small study was done using vitamin C on cancer patients intravenously and showed some signs of success, but the study was too small to be definitive.

You'd think government agencies would be scrambling to fund this sort of research, right? Because they're the ones who supposedly have no financial interests in research? Yeah, right. The system is far too rife with conflicts of interest, and a very dysfunctional "peer review process" for allocating grant monies, for that to work.

My bet is that the dichloroacetate news will fade into the background very quickly. Because neither the US government, nor any major university, nor any private company (pharma or otherwise) will have the least bit of interest in funding further studies. There will be a small handful of tiny, underfunded studies, and that will be that.

Indeed, already those with vested financial and personal prestige issues will be doing their best to put the brakes on anyone who takes this development seriously. Not because the megacomplex of big government and big business wants to kill people--it doesn't, there are few if any mustache-twirling villains--but because of the age old factors of bureaucracy, personal pettiness, ego, and conflicts of interest.

I hope I'm wrong. I don't think I am. They'll already be working hard to pooh-pooh this, and at the first sign that there may be any side effect at all they'll leap on it as proof that this is much too dangerous and that science should be left to people like them who have more serious drugs to test.

Anyone wanna bet?

This part made me laugh:

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines.

Most research universities nowadays are deeply in bed with commercial interests. They won't fund it. And government? I already told you. If you're working under the delusion that our brave National Institutes of Health is anything but a massive institution rife with corruption and croneyism, you're crazy.

Unless this stuff proves so instantly miraculous that absolutely no one can deny it, it'll disappear into the ether.

This part at the end was also amusing:

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers.

That's because mutations don't cause cancer, and so-called "oncogenes" are so rare that they have almost nothing to do with most cancers. The NIH has, so far, pissed away three decades and tens of billions of dollars on a failed paradigm, with very little sign of slowing down, although they're slowly starting to admit that maybe, just maybe, there's something to the aneuploidy theory. It's the nature of that particular beast not to change course if it can possibly avoid it.

Go ahead and quote this back at me in a year.

By the way, capsaicin kills cancer cells too. All of the above goes.

For goodness sakes, look how long it took them just to acknowledge that you can cure most ulcers with antibiotics, and how long and vociferously they argued against even funding studies on the matter. And there was nowhere near as much money to be made on ulcer drugs.

A Dartmouth study asks the question, and suggests that it does not. Indeed, they found that more medical care often equated to higher mortality.

Notice the reactions some will have to this kind of news: they'll use terms like "conspiracy" (as in "there is no conspiracy here I can assure you") and "attacks on doctors and nurses." This seems to happen every time someone notes a serious problem with the system.

The real problem with the system is the conflicts of interest that are rife throughout so much of it. Not every part of it, but large portions of it.

(Thanks Maggie.)

The term "natural gas" is odd on multiple levels. But most Americans, when they use the term, are referring to Methane, as well as Propane, Butane, and Ethane.

Most people around the United States have furnaces and stoves powered by some form of "natural gas." The major exceptions are that minority of you who have electric-powered stoves and furnaces. Even you guys are missing something though: most electricity is powered in the United States by "natural gas." So even if you're a rare "all electric" household, the so-called "natural gas" probably powers you ultimately.

An interesting fact being that most "natural gas" has no odor at all. The gas companies quite intentionally add chemicals like Mercaptan into their "natural gas" mix just so people can smell a strange sulfuric smell if it's leaking. If you've ever suspected a gas leak in your home or business, because you "smelled gas," the only reason was because the gas companies are required to add chemicals just so you'll smell something. The additive chemicals do burn, but nowhere near as efficiently as the scent-less natural gases. They give off a distinct, slightly sulfuric smell even in small quantities.

Otherwise you could die in your home or business. You could inhale huge quantities of these chemicals, and die of asphyxiation well before any explosion. They add these chemicals to give it a smell, usually thanks to state or Federal regulation.

Although this does bring me to one Politically Incorrect observation:

I've had friends and relatives who worked for the gas companies. They've always told me the same thing: if the man of the household (or a single man) says he smells something stinky, they are often skeptical. But if the woman of the household says she smells something funny, they usually believe her. Because, they say, the women are usually much more sensitive to bad smells, and detect those chemical additives in the air much quicker than the men do.

"Men are often wrong, women are usually right." Or so they tell me. Which comes from the grunts on the front line, and not from any corporate position.

Make of that what you will.

In addition to the well-known string/M theory and somewhat lesser known loop quantum gravity, there is another barely-known theory that purports to combine gravity and quantum mechanics and has recently begun to receive some attention. It was initially developed in the 1950s in isolation by Burkhard Heim, using obscure but apparently valid mathematics, and is called Heim theory. A few years ago, the theory was resuscitated and extended by Walter Dröscher and Jochem Häuser, and in 2004 a presentation on based on the theory was awarded a prize from the AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight Technical Committee for the best paper presented that year.

While it seems to have some unresolved issues, Heim theory has the unique attribute of predicting the particle masses using only fundamental constants, which implies that some of its basic tenets may at least warrant serious examination, as this is something neither of the prevailing theories can currently do.

What's really shocking, though, is that Heim theory may, according to proponents, also predict the direction and magnitude of the apparent gravitomagnetic force detected by ESA, which if true would seem to be a truly extraordinary achievement. Not being a physicist, it's hard for me to follow the math involved, but perhaps an astute Dean's World commenter will be able to shed some light on how accurate that claim is.

Heim theory also predicts hyperluminal travel is possible, according to the 2004 presentation linked above, so if there's anything to it the next couple years could be very interesting, perhaps even a watershed moment in human technological development. The LHC is expected to turn up the Higgs boson if it exists (Heim theory says it does not), and scientists at Berkely are trying to replicate the ESA results. You can help with the LHC effort by donating your computer's spare processing time.

The Mars rovers are still actively exploring the Red Planet, and they've just been upgraded with better software that will make them more effective.

Among the rovers' new skills is the ability to automatically recognize and transmit to Earth photographs that they take of swirling dust devils or floating clouds. They can also independently decide whether it is safe to extend their robotic arms to sample rocks.
...
Spirit and Opportunity were also fitted with a new navigation system that allows them to think several steps ahead when faced with an obstacle, allowing them to back out of a dead end or even navigate a maze on their own, Callas said. The robot geologists have previously tackled one problem at a time.

I'm starting to think a bootstrap program of semisentient probes designed to build a habitat on Mars and perhaps even establish self-sustaining industrial production could be a reality in my lifetime.